DE as Discourse Community

Cynthia Pengilly
Pedagogical Tool Review

Distance education has been exploding over the past several years and many traditional colleges and universities are struggling to keep up with proprietary schools, which have outpaced traditional campus-based institutions in their distance education offerings.  Much like my adjunct counterparts housed at brick and mortar institutions, I must teach at several online schools – including proprietary and traditional institutions – in order to make a decent salary.  As such, I (or “we” – to include other online adjuncts) tend to pay attention to sources of information that offer tips, job leads, and other information regarding changes in online teaching requirements and expectations.  In order to stay abreast of such changes, I am a member of numerous online instructor listservs, websites, and even a professional organization geared towards online adjunct instructors.

Tool Description
One such source of information that I rely upon on a daily basis is OnlineTeachingJobs, a moderated, closed-group discussion board which serves as an extension of the book entitled Make Money Teaching Online: How to Land Your First Academic Job, Build Credibility, and Earn a Six-Figure Salary (Babb & Mirabella, 2007). The book was written by online adjunct instructors for online adjunct instructors. I think this is important considering the current academic climate where adjuncts are responsible for teaching a bulk of the course load.  In English Studies, adjunct instructors teach between 52 and 97 percent of courses at the four year institution and more than 50 percent of courses at two year colleges (DeVoss et.al, 2000).  What this book provides is a landscape of the field from the proprietary angle.  The book has been praised, by those wanting to know the “secrets” to getting into the industry, as much as it has been scorned, by those insisting that adjunct conditions will not change if it is touted that online instructors can potentially work very few hours resulting in large amounts of income.

The Book
The book has eleven chapters and I will identify each of the chapter titles. But, in the interest of time, I will only provide overviews of a few key chapters.

• Chapter 1 – Introduction to Online Teaching
• Chapter 2 – Online Schools: Are They For Real?
• Chapter 3 – Preparing Yourself for Teaching Opportunities
• Chapter 4 – Types of Online Teaching Jobs
• Chapter 5 – How Much Can I Earn?
• Chapter 6 – The Hunt: Finding Your First Job
• Chapter 7 – The Interview: What Universities Look For
• Chapter 8 – Sealing the Deal, Training, and Your First Class
• Chapter 9 – Working as an Online Faculty Member
• Chapter 10 – Must-Have Technologies
• Chapter 11 – Maintaining Relationships and Growing Your Business

The book can easily be divided into halves with the first half providing an overview of the field – how to get acclimated with terms (Chapters 1-5).  I will provide an overview of Chapters 2, 4, and 5 because they address issues of legitimacy, the role of online adjuncts and the pay expectations.  Chapter 2 answers the question are online schools for real?  In this chapter, the fears of teaching online are introduced such as the level of rigor in the course objectives, student retention, legitimacy of online degrees, and accreditation concerns including diploma mills and how to spot them.  Chapter 4 covers types of online teaching jobs ranging from high school to college level.  A great amount of detail is spent discussing the role of online adjuncts, why they are needed, and how to balance the teaching load when working for different schools.  This ties in rather nicely to my discussion about discourse communities (see below).  Chapter 5 discusses the pay such as how much to expect for pay, what factors might influence pay (i.e. degree, years of teaching experience), and ways to make extra money by taking on tasks such as course design and working as a mentor to other faculty.

The bulk of the book (Chapters 6-11) covers what to do after breaking into the field. Chapter 8 discusses the training process and teaching the first course; salary and contract negotiation is covered, the different types of training, and preparing for the first course. Chapter 9 discusses the insides of working as an online adjunct including the various types of systems one may encounter, the importance of balancing time based on the workload and pay, and the most efficient way to communicate with students (email).  Chapter 11 discusses networking opportunities and keys to successful relationships at various institutions.  This chapter also covers institutional differences, varying demands, learning from one’s mistakes, and managing money when it is not likely to be consistent.  These are very familiar issues to adjuncts who have already taught on-campus but such issues are even more of a concern when teaching online because of the geographical separation so adjunct concerns are likely to be overlooked.

The Listserv
While new online instructors can use the space to post “help” messages for getting started in the field, they are usually directed to the accompanying guidebook.  The primary function of the listserv includes updates on training for different institutions such as length of training, difficulty (i.e. level of nuisance), and whether it is paid or unpaid. Other issues include the length of time between completing training and being offered the first class and how often classes or contracts are offered at various schools after being in the system as a qualified, trained adjunct instructor.  If there are any new schools venturing out into DE, this information is also readily shared since it is easiest to get in early before competition becomes a problem.  Labor and insurance issues frequently arise and members exchange ideas about how to balance time between schools and how many classes are ideal to teach (which varies depending on discipline); insurance information is also shared since some schools offer insurance to adjuncts (for a higher premium), but this is not the standard.  Finally, the most important information shared in this group is pay per institution and salary.  There is a good amount of dispute over if it is appropriate to share such information but a good amount of members feel that such information is the primary purpose for joining a listserv.  More recently, the debate has died down considerably, as a few members uploaded an Excel spreadsheet which lists a bulk of online institutions and ranks them according to pay; several iterations of this document now exists as members have collaborated by making their own updates to the document and re-posting it to the group. You can view the most recent iteration of this document, an abbreviated version, in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1. Pay and Training Requirements for Online Teaching, Updated 5/24/1010

Tool Adoption
The affordances of the book may be short-lived because of changes in institutional policies, field identity and the like, but the accompanying listserv is not - there are presently 5484 members as of Monday, June 21st, 2010.  As such, the OnlineTeachingJobs Yahoo Group is quite possibly one of the primary places of information exchange between online instructors of all disciplines and of almost every institutional make-up.  While the text and accompanying listserv does not directly deal with teaching writing online, online writing teachers are a part of this larger community and so it does bring in notions of discourse community – something that I believe is missing in many academic conversations about distance education.  English Studies has spent decades trying to answer the age old question of “What is good writing?”  And more recently, English Studies scholars (Warnock, 2009; Neff & Whithous, 2008; Cook, 2004) have grappled with identifying best practices in the field by attempting to answer questions such as “What is a good online writing instructor?” and “How should writing be taught online?” The concept of discourse community is important because it is what helps new online instructors learn the lingo and expectations of the community (Bizzell, 1992).  I believe that the OnlineTeachingJobs community provides that foundation of information on a continuing basis – it is outside the walls of a specific institution and easy to access.

When considering how best to teach writing online, I think it is important to consider how different institutions articulate the role of DE instructors and how it works to confirm or reject the best practices of the field. There is definitely a tension between how this role is articulated when online writing instructors have the authority and autonomy to modify their courses when needed as opposed to teaching pre-packaged or canned course content.  By necessity, this means that we must also consider the role of proprietary schools which is why the concept of discourse communities may be useful for further articulating and understanding the role of online writing instructors.

Argument Support
The one thing that most scholars can agree upon when it comes to DE is that it has fundamentally changed the education landscape.  Peterson (2001) identifies how DE has changed the roles of instructors, modified education goals, and drastically changed student learning.  Writing instructors are encouraged to get more involved in the discussion about DE for two reasons: 1) DE is all about writing so writing teacher’s should be driving the content creation; and 2) writing courses are required courses, even in DE.  Much of the scholarship about DE has come from outside the field of English Studies, which is likely the reason for the trends of DE to have the content designed by someone other than the instructor teaching the course; such practices are actually the opposite of what DE is supposed to accomplish – it works to further separate the student from the instructor instead of bringing them closer together (Peterson, 2001; Neff & Whithous, 2008).  This is where the concept of the facilitator comes into play and Anderson (2008) puts forth the idea that a “guide on the side” is not enough and is really only one part of establishing teaching presence - it is not the main goal that everything stems from.  What Anderson is suggesting here is that the facilitator metaphor and DE generally speaking has not been really critically challenged or questioned. This ties in with the concerns of Higgs & Budd (2007) who provide a political perspective on the growth and development of online higher education; they state that everything has a purpose and there is an ethical problem in higher education’s use of online education because of the tension between the goals of education in capital culture and the pressure to cater to the illusionary ethos of online education.

The illusionary ethos is that online education defines progress as the efficient production of goods - so that education and its means of production become commodities which renders the teacher redundant (i.e. facilitator metaphor rears its ugly head again).  As such, many writing instructors fear that DE will change them into a “deliverer of corporate values and goals, instead of a deliverer of traditional, liberal humanistic goals” (Peterson, 2001, p.360). I feel that such fears are justified when you consider proprietary schools that offer online courses and degree programs that typically have pre-canned courses, restrictions on academic freedom (i.e. limits to how much a course may be supplemented with instructor materials), and even rules about how often and when an instructor must be present in the online classroom.  Writing instructors must get involved in this debate so that we are not exploited by institutions as they attempt to create greater efficiency and greater revenues (Peterson, 2001; Anson, 1999).  Such nuances in institutional policies and practices have serious implications for online writing instructors and to ignore the broader practices of the field is to suggest that the teaching of writing only exists inside a vacuum at traditional institutional structures that are non-proprietary in nature.

If you look closely at the discourse surrounding DE, one of the things that the institutions and course designers are trying to do is construct a standardized ethos for their instructors with very little diversity or varying degrees of subjectivity.  I am suggesting, along with Smelser-Gackler (2001), that ethos, in and of itself, is an argument.  Babb & Mirabella’s (2007) text and Yahoo listserv have etched out some of the missing pieces of the world of distance education by providing an outside or non-academic perspective including its characters, important acts, valued outcomes, and meaningful artifacts (i.e. “figured worlds” see Holland, 1998, p. 52). As instructors attempt to align their natural ethos with their mediated ethos, we must inquire as to how this ethos is constructed in various contexts for the online writing instructor, and we can begin this search by simply looking towards the broader discourse community.

References
Anderson, T. (2008). Teaching in An Online Learning Context. In The Theory and Practice of Online Learning. 2nd Edition.  Edmonton, AB: AU Press. p. 343-366.

Anson, C. (1999). Distance Voices: Teaching and Writing in a Culture of Technology. College English, 61(3), p. 261-280.
Babb, D., & Mirabella, J. (2007). Make Money Teaching Online: How to Land Your First Academic Job, Build Credibility, and Earn a Six-Figure Salary. Wiley Publishing.

Bizzell, P. (1992) Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Cook, K., & Davies, K. (2004). Online Education: Global Questions, Local Answers. Baywood Publishing.

Devoss, Danielle, Dawn Hayden, Cynthia L. Selfe, and Richard J. Selfe, Jr.  (2000). Distance Education:  Political and Professional Agency for Adjunct and Part-Time Faculty, and GTAs.  Moving a Mountain: Transforming the Role of Contingent Faculty in Composition Studies and Higher Education. Ed. Patricia Lambert Stock and Eileen E. Schell. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 261-286.

Higgs, G., & Budd, J. (2007). Toward an Authentic Ethos for Online Higher Education. Policy Futures in Education 5(4): 507-515.

Holland, D., Lachicotte, W., Skinner, D. & Cain, C. (1998). Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Neff, J., & Whithous, C. (2008). Writing Across Distances and Disciplines: Research and Pedagogy in Distributed Learning. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Peterson, P. (2001). The debate about online learning: Key issues for writing teachers. Computers and Composition, 18, p. 359-370.

Smelser-Gackler, Lynn. (2000). Looking for the Teacher: Ethos in the Online Classroom. Journal of Literacy and Technology 1(2): Spring 2001.

Warnock, S. (2009). Teaching Writing Online: How &Why. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English.